[alexbock]

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is very interesting from a legal standpoint. Regulating wild birds is not one of the enumerated powers of Congress, but the federal government entered a treaty with Canada to protect migratory birds and successfully argued in the Supreme Court that it could enter such a treaty despite not having the power to enforce it, and that by entering the treaty it gained the power to enforce it. This is vaguely reminiscent of the Five Eyes reciprocal spying arrangement.

During the 1930s there were some other interesting attempts at regulating things through complicated "taxation" systems, including marijuana and machine-guns (only the latter law survives today).

Creative legislative techniques like this don't seem to occur as often now that Congress has settled on just declaring everything to be "interstate commerce" (which is how the modern drug laws work, and if a migratory bird law were passed today I'm sure they would consider birds that cross state lines to be involved in interstate commerce).

[js2]

The most recent episode of the “More Perfect” podcast (which discusses Supreme Court cases) is about the commerce clause:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/one-nation-under-money/

(No transcript unfortunately.)